Author: litmag_admin

Excerpts:

 11/13/2012

Dear Professor,

I just got out of the doctor’s office:

they wanted to scar my face and kill what’s inside me.

I ran out and did not pay.

Jacob A.

12/5/2012

Dear Professor,

Things on the streets have been really crazy. I have been very distracted watching and listening to what is going on, it is somewhat out of my control. But, I miss you and class. I will be in class on Monday.

Thank you,

Bye

Sandra

5/29/2014

Dear Professor,

I have registered for your [Course Name] starting June 4th and very much look forward to these sessions. Unfortunately two weeks ago while in the Sahara desert I fell off a camel and fractured 4 ribs. I am in Paris recuperating but as you probably know only time and pain killers are the treatment. I will not be able to travel in time to make the first session on 4th June but hope to be in New York in time for the second and subsequent sessions.

I would appreciate your input on the following:

–venue as to where to meet at 3:15pm stating on June 11th

–should I obtain any reading or other materials needed or desirable for the course

–would you have an outline or any notes you could let me have on the material you will cover (and I will miss) for the first session.

I look forward to meeting with you.

kind regards

Paul C. 

4/18/2015

Dear Professor, 

I am very sorry about the lateness of my assignments. And my absences during the semester. I am graduating after this semester and I found myself swamped with a ton of work I was not expecting. All of this piled up with vet visits, caring for my new puppy, and other things getting in the way I lost a lot of my energy this semester. I’ve attached all the assignments in this email. And if there is anything else I can give you please let me know. 

Thank you for a great semester and for understanding,

All the best,

William

12/7/15

Dear Professor,

Excuses section: I’m sorry that I had to leave early on Tuesday last week and was additionally unable to attend on Thursday. On Thursday something came up and I was sadly unable to attend any of my classes. For Tuesday I do not have such a good reason, if I am honest I left 20 minutes early because of a beautiful girl (the only and last time I would use this reason and I apologize, I let instinctual hedonism take over for better or worse!)

Interesting section: I have been working on this piece “To Fear with Love” and thought you might appreciate it as per our earlier discussion about writing. It is attached below for your enjoyment and I would love any feedback/criticism! 

Best,

Abraham

Odee Bones was an autograph name, a stage tag, a nom de la rue as she often said. Her real name was Odile Bonnard, like the famous painter, but not that family. She was a raven-haired woman, or as Frank imagined her, a Poe-haired woman. She had an Edgar Poe-like personality—morbid, dark, seemingly bred in some remote country you never heard of. And, except for a few absurd tics, she fit quite well in the parade of that depressed poet’s heroines—a Lenore or a Legeia—all the femme fatales of the stewed Romantic imagination.

And Frank often pictured her just that way: Odee Bones, weeping by the cold tomb of her mother; Odee Bones languishing in the musty bed chamber of some gothic mansion clutching a crucifix; Odee Bones standing alone in a wolverine fur cape at the end of a stone jetty in the English Channel during a storm; Odee Bones, wounded and bleeding at the bottom of a ravine in an upstate New York forest, while Catskill coyotes howled at the moon.

She had that seductive quality of women who are aligned with the death drive, be it by choice or accident. Sex with such women was dangerous. It might start out fun, but somewhere in the middle you begin to realize you’re dissolving into the all too real and indifferent universe, an inorganic molecular void in which your lust was the product of chemical imbalances and your precious personal thoughts were nothing but crashing atoms spinning endlessly down through bottomless space. Which is to say, she could make you afraid, but somehow that only increased Frank’s attraction, an attraction that was currently drawing him away from Lincoln Center and toward his home downtown.

He passed the A-C-D subway station north of Columbus Circle. He should have got the train and rode home, but this night, he decided to walk instead. He would walk all the way downtown. Hell, he might even stop for a beer somewhere to make the walk more lively. You couldn’t drink openly on NYC streets anymore thanks to Herr Rudolf—no more brown paper bags in his Broken Windows world, or as Frank liked to think of it—Broker Windows, i.e. making the city safe for Wall Street, their clients and children.

In any case, there used to be a bar around 61st and Broadway—a McCann’s or a Miller’s. Frank couldn’t remember the name, but he used to hang there decades ago when he was naïve and young and had no confidence or talent. It was an old school New York steam table bar where you could get a pastrami sandwich or mashed potatoes and gravy and sit in a booth scribbling in a notebook like a hoarder taking a break from his collections. No one bothered you. Such bars were an important form of escape in Frank’s early NYC life. Of course, one of the illusions of youth is that you can actually escape from yourself, your family, your spouse, your history. Thirty years might pass before you realize you can’t, not even at the friendly bar rail of McCann’s. In part, because McCann’s wasn’t there anymore. It was now one of those ubiquitous Korean-run salad bar joints with their over-priced convenience and their perpetually grumpy cashiers.

Frank passed the salad bar and continued to Columbus Circle. To his left was the skeleton of a new Trump Hotel. They were stripping the façade off the former Gulf and Western Building, to rebrand it. The whole area was just beginning to attract the new money class. The high towers and stone facades to the east were there to house both the power brokers of the city and their imitators who paced back and forth in their luxury apartments overlooking the park, sipping martinis through crystal straws similar to those used to suck up the life blood and brain waves of all the anonymous Janes and Joes wandering in the streets below.

Fuck them, Frank thought as he made his way around the circle’s west side to 9^th Ave and turned south. Back in the 70s, he used to live in a building on 57^th and 9^th. The building was boarded up now, but Frank would always walk by when he was in the neighborhood. 400 W. 57^th was the address, but the door was on 9^th. The building sometimes reminded him of a ghost ship rising out of the turbulent sea of his own past bearing the Ark of some Frank Payne Covenant, and if and when the wrecking ball ever hit it, the ghosts and stories of thousands of departed residents would come raging out like a psychic storm howling over the now trendy west side.

Despite the scaffolding, there was no construction, and hadn’t been for years. In the middle of one of the most rapidly developing parts of Manhattan, this particular building remained abandoned, a sore thumb of resistance in the fetishistic creep of Midtown glass and steel. Rumor had it that some tenant refused to leave. The landlord could not legally evict the person so they had to wait until he or she died. But then, who knew if that rumor was true.

Some buildings take on a sinister quality over time, and 400 West 57^th was one of them. It had a definite “don’t-go-there-aura” like the house your grandma used to warn you about on at the end of Death and Disease Street. Such buildings might be associated with murder, suicide, Satanic ritual or extreme and unnatural sex. They were often accompanied by ominous music too, and because of their geological intensity they had the ability to bend light, to glow eerily and warp the space/time matrix for blocks around. On humid nights the streetlights would hiss and crackle, radiating diffuse halos of impending mental pain. And so Frank walked by his old haunt with trepidation, and the 70s walked alongside him when he did. Odee always claimed he was a man out of time, living in limbo, with no fixed identity or purpose.

The 70s were like an alternative universe, a traveling black window-pane next to Frank’s ear. All he had to do was pop his head inside that little window and he would be back in that old black and white New York he loved—a city of deli sandwiches and shot and beer specials, a city where men wore fedoras and overcoats, and made important calls from phone booths, feeding the quarters into the slot and listening to the slow syncopated beat of the falling coins as they hit the bottom of the box.

That old room, as he remembered it, had a certain disturbed perspective, claustrophobic and fast, but at the same time, static. Frank would sit in the fourth floor window watching the shadows moving in the street below while smoke and steam rose from the vents of Hells Kitchen and Midtown. He used to imagine the water tanks were music notes on a patchwork staff of asphalt rooftops. He listened to radio dramas in his room back then—rebroadcasts of The Shadow and the Isaac Asimov Hour. Everything that came out of the radio seemed old—old singers, old songs, old stories. Even the timbre of men’s voices was different—a post-war tremor still lived in them, a gee-whiz paranoia that mixed innocence with the toxic ambitions of the capitalist age.

He remembered the other men who lived in the apartment with him: drifters and odd balls with old-timey nick names like Laughing Ralph, Jimmy the Kid, Broadway Danny, and Mickey Leftovers—fringe dwellers and misfits with adjectives attached to their names as if to scaffold their fragile identities. None of them would ever be famous for anything, so they needed those adjectives if only to avoid disappearing into the void of city life.

But disappear they did. Jimmy the Kid disappeared one day. He left all his stuff in his room and they had to throw it out. It was mostly stolen stuff anyway, because, as Ralph always said, the Kid was nothing but a petty thief and his day of reckoning had probably come. Mickey Leftovers went to the hospital and never came back. They carried him out on a stretcher, fighting the whole way, his bedclothes stained with blood and urine.

Ambulances came and went with a certain frequency on that corner. One day Frank and Laughing Ralph were standing around down on the corner watching the aftermath of a car crash. Car crashes, like fires, were good entertainment in the days before computers. People would meet their neighbors and catch up on community gossip. “Hey Jimbo, how’s the wife and kids?”  “I hear Finkelstein’s pharmacy is closing.” Ralph swept his flabby arm across the 9^th Ave. landscape and laughed: “Just think, all this madness when all people really want to do is watch TV, have a decent meal and fuck.” Frank though it was a profound comment at the time. A month later Laughing Ralph was also gone—some kind of heart problem.

Back in the 70s, Frank used the phone booth across 9^th as a personal phone. Passersby would shout up to his window, “Yo Frank, your girlfriend’s on the phone.” Frank’s girlfriend was Darley Cohen, a Brooklyn gal, from way out in Sunset-Flatbush-Midwood world, a land of cut-rate upholstery shops and bagel bakeries. You could smell the sea from the stoop of her house but you couldn’t see it. The sea was still ten subway stops away. Sometimes, they would go and look at the sea, but the cold grey aura of human insignificance often got to be too much for them.

Now Darley Cohen was no Odee Bones; she wasn’t “artistic” or “creative” but they did share certain traits. They were both dark-eyed and tragic. They both had an engaging sarcastic laugh, and they both had a certain languid acceptance that suicide was probably the most likely outcome to a life without logic or vector. Happiness was a matter of getting by day to day and keeping a short focus. Both women were runaways if only in spirit. In some sense, Frank provided this service for each of them—he was the perpetual stranger in town, any town, and as such he was an easy substitute for running away from home. It was an odd role for a boyfriend but he wore it with pride because it worked for him.

One night after drinking at some Wall Street Irish watering hole with his dishwashing buddies, Reid and Warren, he came home quite late and there was Darley, sitting in front of his door with a half-assed bandage tied around her left wrist claiming she had just tried to kill herself but she decided to come see Frank instead, as if he might offer her some reason to live. Frank knew he was the last person anyone should call if they needed a reason to live, but apparently he was just that person for Darley that night. And Odee must have felt the same way that day she showed up downstairs of his Lower East Side apartment twenty years later with a suitcase and a perverse bond to an old abusive boyfriend named Otto, the Oedipal Austrian.

Now, as often happens, there’s a movie in Frank’s head closely associated with the building at 400 W 57^th St. It’s called Angelheart, an Oedipal mystery in which Mickey Rourke plays Harry Angel, hot on the trail of a crime of which he discovers that he himself is the perpetrator. Certain scenes were pertinent, especially the shot of a lighted window high above a midtown street, where Harry Angel sold his soul to Satan. Frank had made a similar transaction, which was somehow related, after the fact, to Darley’s suicide attempt. It was a week or so earlier. There was pint of bourbon, a candle, a jack-knife, and, if he tried, he could still feel the heat of that candle flame and the knife blade edge against his palm, but he couldn’t remember what got sold and to whom? Who was the seller and who was the buyer? Was it Existential Despair that drove it? A taste for Dada? Or plain old morbid Romanticism.

Probably the most Angelhearted thing about the building was the elevator. It was a narrow beige box resonant with the smell of wigs, second hand suits, hair product, and little dogs. When you were going down it felt like it would keep going down, past the ground floor, through the sub-basement and into the very crust of the earth. In fact, there were buttons on the elevator panel that didn’t have numbers on them, as if the panel was originally made for a taller building, or one that had private floors. Frank had even pushed these buttons a few times but they didn’t do anything. At least that’s what he thought at the time.

 Frank remembered nights riding that elevator past the third floor, the one below his, and he would often hear a Billie Holiday record playing all soft and crackly somewhere in the interior. Sometimes the elevator would stop on that floor all by itself and the door would open, but nobody ever got on. And there was always the music—he could still hear it, echoing around the empty halls.

It was a scene straight out of Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch, but this movie was directed by Frank himself, and he could walk into that scene; he could get off over and over on the 3^rd floor and walk down the hall like a lost actor on the wrong set until he reached the room where the music played. The door was open and Frank entered. The room was empty except for a man sitting at a table with his back to the door. The man seemed to be writing something, scribbling in a notebook while the record was spinning on an old phonograph.

Frank walked up behind the guy, took him by the shoulders and turned him around in his swivel chair. That’s when realized the body had no weight! In fact, it was nothing but a dusty old suit stuffed with straw. But there was a face to it, not unlike Frank’s own face. It was rubbery and gooey and the features were smeared into a blur somewhere between laughter and disgust. Suddenly Frank understood why they couldn’t tear the building down.

He pleaded with the guy: “You’ve gotta let it go man. You’ve got to let me out of here.” He shook the over-sized sad doll, but there was no answer, because you can’t answer when your mouth is just a smear on a pitiful illusion. And Lady was the perfect soundtrack for the ambiguity. “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” she sang. Take what away? And who from? And why did Odee love that song? 

Did I mention that Billie Holiday was Odee’s favorite singer. She said the voice had a sense of decay about it, a sense of falling or of having already fallen. She said listening to Lady was like walking through a graveyard with a forced smile. And did I mention that Frank first met Odee Bones in a Brooklyn waterfront bar on New Year’s Eve, the same symbolic night that Harry Angel sold his soul to Satan. The noose of associations was tightening like a string of prayer beads around Frank’s mind, beads he counted to a beat marked off in images of tombstones in a moonlit cemetery and jagged water tanks on Manhattan rooftops and the rattle of subway cars making down rails to dark outer boroughs and the whistling of lonely homeless men in scaffold shadows. Music was everywhere, but it was the tone that concerned Frank most—it was disturbing and not a little prophetic. As Billie herself might sing: “Swing Brother, Swing.” Shoobeedoobeedo. Here comes another dewey-eyed fool. And so, on that note, Frank crossed 56^th and continued walking south, thinking his sweetheart Odee Bones might actually be home when he got there.

The protagonists of Euripides’ Bakkhai (New Directions, Dec 2017) are a new god and a cross-dressing conservative. Dionysos has just arrived from the east; though Anne Carson is quick to remind us in her new translation that his presence in Mycenaean tablets dates all the way back to the 12th century BC. This is not surprising. Dionysos is a perpetual stranger, and his religion a constant other. He is nicknamed Bromios (or “boisterous”), after his birth from Zeus’ thunderbolt, which killed his mother Semele and caused the god of gods, his father, to sew Dionysos into his thigh. From this “masculine womb” he is born again, which earns him his second nickname: “twice-born.” He stings the women of Thebes into madness with his thyrsos: a wand of giant fennel topped with a pinecone. He drives them into the mountains where they worship him with wild dances, ritual hunts, sexual escapades, and feasts on raw flesh and wine.

Pentheus, the young and hotheaded new ruler of Thebes, thinks this is all giving his town a bad name, so he imprisons the god’s followers—the Bakkhai, including his mother Agave. But the god liberates them. As is true for most radical conservatives, Pentheus’ fury and intolerance are mixed with irrepressible obsession. Dionysos, who has put on human form as a swoony, longhaired religious leader with “bedroom eyes” and “cheeks like wine” (Pentheus’ own words) is all too aware of this. He convinces Pentheus to dress up as a woman so that he may spy on the Bakkhai without being seen—thus quenching the young man’s curiosity and luring him inexorably into Dionysos’ followers’ claws. Agave sees Pentheus hiding in a tree, and in a fit of Bakkhic madness takes him for a young lion, slaying her son with the help of her maenads. The play ends with Kadmos, her father and the founder of Thebes, revealing to her the nature of her crime, which results in the family going into exile: each member cast out alone.

Anne Carson’s translation is all one would expect of her work: modern, frisky, precise, dense, completely original, and absolutely devastating. As in her other versions of Euripides and Sophocles (like Grief Lesson, Electra, and Antigone) Carson’s line breaks turn the play into a poetry at turns lush and riotous, at others glibly deadpan and ironic. The latter applies in both the dramatic and contemporary senses. At the hands of Carson, it’s a linguistic treat on every level: from Bakkhai’s cascading choruses, to the cast of characters’ rhetorical spars, to the final elegies spoken by Kadmos and Agave that leave one with a sense of raw and irresolvable trauma. Raw indeed on the level of character and drama, but air-tight as crystal in Carson’s economical verse. The result might remind us of what Nietzsche felt only Greek Tragedy could do: fuse the Apollonian and the Dionysian completely. But the play teaches us—and this might be its central lesson—that the Dionysian itself requires a balance of impulses.

The play is surprisingly fresh in its affirmative depiction of women’s spiritual, moral, and sexual freedom—in equal measure, it’s condemnatory of intolerant men. In the order of Bakkhai, the fury of a conservative cannot outlive his hidden fixations. A man of closeted compulsion, who subjects women to the duality of his voyeurism (desire and disgust) before he plans to destroy them for good, will suffer a horrible fate. The logic of Dionysos, in which these impulses must resolve themselves into consummation and release, will not allow this kind of stubborn and compartmentalized approach. The play’s Freudianism avails itself not only in repressed desires, but also ideological vision: the clash here is on the order of collective as well as personal fantasy, and is as frightening as it is fatalistic. And not too distant from the destructive results of our current politics.

Dionysos is no easy god to pin down. Carson associates him in her translator’s note (also a poem) with beginnings: “[he is] your first sip of wine / from a really good bottle. / Opening page // of a crime novel.” Tiresias, that blind prophet and traveler between sexes, summarizes him like no one else can: Dionysos is the “wet element”—“cool forgetting of the hot pains of day”—as well as “that flash across the peaks of Delphi / tossing like a great wild spark from crag to crag.” He fertilizes and sates by giving us drink and the knowledge to press grapes, and he brings forth visions and voluptuous pursuits, alongside the deep trances of terror and sleep. Tiresias instructs Pentheus to “pour his wine, dance his dances, say yes.” But Pentheus cannot be brought to yield, because he knows too well that in the case of Dionysos—who favors women—the patriarchy is at stake. He is unable to conceive for a moment that his mother Agave and her sisters, who are after all his “inferiors,” might know something that he doesn’t. His plans for the Bakkhai, who’ve taken up cymbals and drums, is to “sell [them] into slavery or put [them] to work at our looms.” And when it comes to Dionysos’ popularity abroad, he has few words: “foreigners all lack sense, compared to Greeks.” His prudish, belligerent, deeply misogynistic, and overtly xenophobic demeanor might remind us of Trump. As might his simpleminded diction: “This Bakkhic insanity is catching like wildfire. / What a disgrace! … we’re going to make war on [them].” Except, of course, Pentheus has the charm of being in his late teens or twenties, still somewhat malleable, and willing therefore to play dress-up for his basic instincts.

Dionysos is Pentheus’ proper foil: composed, quietly determined, patient, and sharp-witted. His response to Pentheus’ qualm with strangers is that “there’s more than one kind of sense.” When Pentheus sends guards to arrest him, Dionysos exclaims, “Okay, tie me up!” and after he escapes, he relates to the Bakkhai: “Just between you and me, / I had a bit of fun with him and his ropes.” However, after Pentheus crosses him twice, the dovish demeanor is revealed to be a mere externality, and Dionysos begins to plot. After all, Bacchus is dual in nature: “god of the intensities of terror, / god of the gentlest human peace.” But even then, Dionysos does not lose his composure. In fact, his whole act rests on his suave seduction of Pentheus to act against his own interests. This might be another bizarre link to our political present. Once facts and sensible discourse (embodied in the person of Tiresias) fail to convert, the god resorts to wiles: to the coaxing of subterranean inclinations. Our centuries-old politics of manners is proof that this method of persuasion often trumps the verdict of facts: from Andrew Jackson throwing his forceful simple-man’s vocabulary, to Reagan hiding all culpability behind an actor’s poise, to Trump assuring his audiences with that brash New York baritone. But Bakkhai’s Dionysos embodies the message that true overcoming—on a cosmic, moral, and political scale—requires the synthesis of these two facets of life: reason and passion. The Dionysian leader does not so much “use” either as simultaneously “channel” both in an expression of truth.

Dionysos’ duality is best expressed in a scene where a group of herdsmen encounter the Bakkhai on a journey through the woods. When the men chance upon them, they are peacefully sleeping in three circles, each around the female elders of Thebes, the daughters of Kadmos: Ino, Autonoe, and Agave. Upon the beasts’ braying, the women spring up, “somehow instantly organized”: “with snakes that slid up to lick their cheeks, / some (new mothers who’d left their babies at home) / [cradling] wolf cubs or deer in their arms and [suckling] them.” Honey drips from their thyrsi, and the Bakkhai strike the ground to produce wine, or scratch with their bare hands to draw out milk. But when the herdsmen attempt to attack, in order to return Agave to her son Pentheus, all hell breaks loose. The women tear entire calves and bulls apart (“chunks of flesh dripped from the pine trees, blood everywhere”) and descend upon two villages, where the men’s swords fail to draw any blood, yet the Bakkhai’s thyrsi wound them badly.

This gory scene foreshadows Pentheus’ fate. The dramatic ironies of the sections that follow, that of Pentheus’ sprucing at the hands of Dionysos, and his death on the mountain, are impeccable. (Important also to note here that Pentheus means “grief” in Ancient Greek.) After Dionysos personally dresses and makes him up, the leader wonders aloud whether he looks like his mother. “I was tossing my head back and forth like a maenad inside the house,” he says, in a statement ripe with dramatic pathos. When the god offers to correct his hair, he happily submits: “You redo it. I’m in your hands.” And when Dionysos tells him he will be victorious, that someone other than he will return him home, Pentheus exclaims: “My mother!” The god tonelessly affirms him.

In the section that follows, the Bakkhai reiterate their mission: “the great clear joy of living pure and reverently, / rejecting injustice / and honoring gods.” Then they make their call against Pentheus: “Into the throat / of / the / ungodly / unlawful / unrighteous / earthborn / son / of Echion / let justice / sink her sword / !” Carson mirrors the Bakkhai’s fluctuating intents. Earlier, when she speaks of “skylarking,” and compares the Bakkhai to a fawn leaping free of its hunter, the prose cascades down the page like a peaceful river. Dionysos is freely dialectical here: both hunted and hunter, frolicking while calling out for punishment against Pentheus. But when actually rousing Agave and the women for Pentheus’ death, her words become tightened at the center of the page, turning into literal swords.

Carson translates the scene that follows from two perspectives: that of the Bakkhai, and a servant following Pentheus on his last journey. Once again, Pentheus’ pathos is sharply etched, when he calls out to his mother for mercy, and Carson’s lines chop back: “But she / was foaming at the mouth, / was rolling her eyes, / was out of her mind.” The irony continues into Agave’s slow coming-to. After she has fixed her son’s head onto her thyrsos and paraded it for the rest of the Bakkhic women, she says to herself: “What a fresh bloom he is, / just a kid, just a calf – / here, see the down on his cheeks, / the long soft hair.” She exclaims that she wants her son to nail this head to their house, as a trophy of her hunt and the success of Dionysos. Kadmos talks her awake from her trance. Even the sky begins to brighten, like a sign that Agave and the women were moving through an alternate dimension of their own, or that of the god’s: a pre-modern Upside Down. In response to her realization, Kadmos says the one line that could sum up all of tragedy: “Truth is an unbearable thing. And its timing is bad.” Agave remembers nothing of her deed, and where the text is missing in the original Greek, Carson works wonders through her curt poetry, this time of reckoning: “His body. / His dear, dear body. / This is my son. / This is what I did.” Here we learn that Agave too had denied the god, and this is her punishment.

What is amazingly refreshing in Bakkhai is the unquestioned triumph of Dionysos and, especially for the western reader, the pre-Christian (and pre-Roman) sense of Dionysian order as proper to humankind. The Bakkhai say so again and again: “ancient, / elemental, / fixed in law and custom, / grown out of nature itself” is Dionysos, and he’s therefore to be respected. This is amazing, bearing in mind that Dionysos did not fare well under the Romans. The Senate saw his followers as a secretive and subversive counter-culture: seditious to both civil and religious law. These cults were mostly lead by women, and at gatherings they outnumbered men. The Bacchanalia was banned by the edict of 186 BC, and its members threatened with the death penalty.

Carson captures the renegade spirit of the Bakkhai in her verse. This is how they speak of Dionysos: “He is sweet upon the mountains / when he runs from the pack, / when he drops to the ground, / hunting goatkill blood / and rawflesh pleasure.” The compound words may seem unmistakably Carson’s, but they’re in fact direct translations. The women refer to Dionysos’ emissary (the young religious leader) as their “comrade.” Later Livy, whose accounts of the cult were filled with exaggeration and outright lies, writes that Bakkhic devotees’ nocturnal rites included loud and haunting music, feasts, drunken orgies, murder, and even cannibalism. Shockingly, the Romans also accused early Christians of human sacrifice, and believed that the host was dipped in the blood of a child. In the second century AD, Christians turned these accusations against the pagan in their war against witches’ covens. The latter may not be surprising, given that Dionysos models what became the Devil for fear-mongering Catholics and Protestants, from medieval superstition through to the Inquisition, and all the way up to the Salem witch trials. Just like Dionysos, the Devil sprouts horns, shape-shifts into animals, and communes with and empowers women who submit to him with magic powers.

Here Christianity’s complete reliance on this other order—of the unknown, of magic, and of women’s sexual and moral liberty—is loud and clear: “Whether the Belief that there are such Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic Faith that Obstinacy to maintain the Opposite Opinion manifestly savours of Heresy,” reads the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486.. The Malleus is the Inquisitors’ guidebook to the identification and persecution of witches, and it answers this formal query with a mighty yes. To read this bizarre and famous work today is to learn that witches’ covens were seen as a threat to the entirety of Christendom, including its masochistic-misogynistic dominance over all forms of spiritual resistance. In Anne Carson’s translation, the whole of this strange history glows through the page. Most notably in an early chorus where the poet inserts this chant into the original play: “green of dawn-soaked dew and slender green of shoots … green of the honeyed muse, / green of the rough caress of ritual, / green undaunted by reason or delirium.” These wizardly treats are endemic to her version.

And later, this spell by Dionysos himself: “Spirit of earthquake, shake the floor of this world!” This, however, is all Euripides. The difference between Bakkhai and the rest of Judeo-Christian history is that in the Ancient Greek play, Dionysos and the women are owed our full regard, and they triumph—though at a cost to Thebes. In Bakkhai, which won first prize at the Dionysia festival where it premiered in 405 BC, this god that reaches way down into our evolutionary roots and affirms everything about our bodies and desires—in good measure, as he repeatedly instructs—along with all the women who enjoy his blessings, are portrayed as impregnable forces. The play shows us that we cannot not revere them, as we’d do so at great cost to our own freedom and integrity. Dionysos is the “rawflesh” prelude to the human imagination that is inescapable even to its finest and most noble pursuits.

This message feels as important today as it did over 2,400 years ago. Hence the commissioning of this ravishing new translation by the Almeida Theater, where it was first staged in July of 2015 starring Ben Wishaw as Dionysos, Bertie Carvel as Pentheus, and renowned director James Macdonald at the prow—better known for his work with contemporary authors. The production opened to raving praise of Orlando Gogh’s score and Ben Wishaw’s acting, which the Guardian described as “insinuating and dangerous,” and “the most perfect portrayal of androgyny.”

With its due relevance in mind, let’s let Bakkhai have the last word: “Many are the forms of the daimonic / and many the surprises wrought by gods. / What seemed likely did not happen. / But for the unexpected a god found a way. / That’s how this went / today.”

 The notion of the female text is one that some — such as my mid-20s self — may find slightly embarrassing, somewhat self-indulgent, maybe also a little bit gross. In its resistance to patriarchal norms, the female text gathers up and embraces notions of female otherness (some might say, of an essentializing, TERF-y kind), those tainted with a whiff of inferiority, claiming a messiness and irrationality and animal physicality for womanhood that some find, well, rather off-putting. Does celebrating womanhood really require writing in fragments, having intense emotions, writing about breast milk? Can’t we be cool, successful modern women, with effortless bodies, who do not coo over children?

Of course, that notion of “coolness” is itself a patriarchal norm, a specifically male version of success that denigrates femininity of a more fleshy (and attainable) kind. So the point of écriture féminine is precisely to bask in this alternative aesthetic, to valorize what has been shunned.  So perhaps some of the (ok, my) discomfort with the idea is simply internalized misogyny. But we have also learned, some of us, to be leery of the whole-hearted embrace of the personal, which is so often effused to the detriment of a consideration of the structural. White feminism, in particular, is frequently linked to an adamant demand for feelings to be recognized, validated, at the cost of broader awareness of the feelings, and plight, of other women. 

I say all this to explain why, when the opening lines of A Ghost in the Throat announce, in all-caps, that THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT, one may not immediately feel a surge of enthusiasm (those who do will hardly need me to persuade them to read it). 

Doireann ní Ghríofa’s new book performs the remarkable feat, however, of restoring the sense of urgency to the notion of the feminine text, paying poignant homage to the various ways and things that women create — poems, but also shopping lists, and domestic spaces, and relationships, and children — often in the interstices of masculinist histories from which they are later erased, if they ever appeared at all. A Ghost in the Throat tells the story of the author’s obsession with an 18th century Irish poem, The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire, and its author, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. The poem — a chronicle of Eibhlín Dubh’s romance with her (second) husband, his murder, her grief, her curses upon his killers and their accomplices — is, Ní Ghríofa skillfully shows us, astonishing, a miracle of vividness, verve, sensuality, and rage. But its author is generally known primarily in relation to the men in her life — as the wife of her murdered husband, or, sometimes, as the aunt of the famous politician, Daniel O’Connell. Ní Ghríofa sets out to learn more, and brings us along on the journey. 

The work of recovered history is perhaps always a deeply intimate project, one that implicates the searcher as well, and it is also a project that invites imaginative speculation, and a fictive recreation of the subject’s world and inner life. In this case, the obstacles that present themselves in the hunt for traces of Eibhlín Dubh’s life, the contemplation of her person, are inextricably bound up with the nature of womanhood. As A Ghost in the Throat gradually makes us understand, the story of Doreen Ní Ghríofa’s project therefore must be as well. 

This begins in the first chapter, as Ní Ghríofa describes her experiences as pregnant new mother, pumping milk to donate to strangers, being reminded of an old poem she read in school when she drives past a road sign bearing a familiar name, and after days of racking her brain, recalls that it is the name of the cemetery where that woman’s lover was buried. Waiting for her oldest child to get out of school, she pulls up the poem on her phone and reads it. And then again, and again, at night when others are sleeping, and in the blank spots of her day, as she pumps. To donate your breastmilk is to double down on the altruism of breast-feeding, to give of your own body to another as food. One of the most memorable details in The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire is that his distraught widow gulps down handfuls of his blood. And so we see the beginnings of the book’s skillful weaving together of various ideas, ways of thinking about the body and the things that it makes, the gifts that pass from one body to another, such as breast milk, or the words of an oral poem that are transmitted from one speaker to the next across time and space, or the knowledge that a cadaver offers to aspiring medical students.

Ní Ghríofa collects various translations of the poem, then begins to seek out biographical information about its author (and to create her own translation). As the text progresses, she tells the story of Eibhlín Dubh’s life so far as she can reconstruct it, which subtly shades into a recounting of the events of the poem. The words of the 18th century text are given a new force, woven into the tapestry of a larger life story in a skillful blend of paraphrase and direct quotation. We learn of the poet’s childhood, her first marriage, and her return home, giving added context to the moment Eibhlín Dubh first set eyes on Art (“how my eye took a shine to you, / how my heart took delight in you”). For readers unfamiliar with the poem, there’s a kind of thrilling suspense in the way Ní Ghríofa takes us through the tale — we know it will end badly, but we are nonetheless gutted when it happens. And so too, we witness Ní Ghríofa’s efforts to learn more about the past, an effort that we know can never be entirely successful, though we still feel a thudding sense of disappointment when it is. We move through fruitless visits to archives, running our eyes over long lists of names in birth and baptismal registries, looking for any sign of this remarkable woman, or her descendants. And we learn of Ní Ghríofa’s life as she does so, of her visits to the various sites and the conversations she has with tour guides, and the memories and revelations from her own past that these encounters spark.

And so, as we hunger for more of Eibhlín Dubh’s story, and linger mournfully over the silences and gaps that keep her from us, we are granted access to the kinds of details of a woman’s life that are the very ones missing from the historical record. The dawning realization of this unfolding concretizes, in a remarkable way, how women’s experiences tend towards erasure, and silence, even as they create worlds. We watch as Ní Ghríofa gives herself over to childcare, to laundry, to moving house, to the sleepy high of hormones that a new baby infuses you with, to creating a garden for bees and lists of things that need doing. We see her studying the changes to her own body. We witness her wrestle with the contradiction of motherhood — that it is a form of creation, but one that comes at a cost to self. This theme of intermingled losses and gains, of love and mourning, is one that pervades the entire book, like a jewel whose facets twinkle as it is rolled in an open palm. We hear only in passing of Ní Ghríofa’s poetry (she has written multiple books of it). As she continues to seek out more of Eibhlín Dubh’s life, we begin to worry, as does she, about the costs of this obsession, to wonder: how can it end? And it is the way that she brings the story to a finale that makes us most clearly aware, perhaps, of how skillfully the book has been constructed throughout.

The structure of A Ghost in the Throat echoes, in a way, the structure of Eibhlín Dubh’s poem. Each chapter is a stanza of sorts, self-contained and distinct, yet contributing its portion to the larger whole. And within each chapter is a careful braid of the various thematic threads that comprise the delicate architecture of the overall text. Return to the first chapter after you have finished the book and you’ll find that it’s all there, the myriad themes that surface throughout, only you didn’t recognize them, then. Flip back through the pages and you will be startled to notice that things are not at all in the order you remembered them — that your mind has reconfigured the various elements, grouped them anew, and that returning to various chapters, a new element will emerge that rearranges the constellations once more, or reveals an entirely new strand of associations and ideas. So too, you arrive at Doreen Ní Ghríofa’s translation of The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire, appended to the end of the book, and find that you feel as if you knew it already, in an intimate, bodily way, even as it also feels entirely original, extraordinary.

A Ghost in the Throat is, first and foremost, an homage to a poem, a powerful case for the appreciation of a work of 18th century writing that many will encounter only as an obligatory assignment in school, if ever. It is also the story of a process of research, which sheds fascinating light on the work of historical inquiry, and the ways we seek to understand, and connect to, the past. And it is a reflection on motherhood, and women’s experiences, a story of how one person manages the seemingly impossible demands of balancing duties to home, family, self, and art — a meditation on what a person leaves behind.

1.

As a Gemini in good standing

I divide everything in two

cannot conceive of Adam without Eve

dividing Eden between them

for one full day

in Ithaca in the sun and then to bed

the bed we made of wood from an olive tree

2.

There is nothing like a dame

a Martini

the last at-bat of the first game of the 1988 World Series

a Martini with a dozen raw oysters

a jug of water for the geraniums on a day of full sun

a joint

a bedroom farce

a weekend in a swank hotel in Montreal

a day without news

dying in your sleep

3.

What do you want to do on your birthday

Well, I have to file my column, run two errands,

empty two boxes of books, shelve them

write a poem or revise an old one worry that

I write too much decide not to worry enjoy

Linda Ronstadt singing “Frenesi” in Spanish

It’s my birthday and I can fly if I want to

high if I want to

join me the sun is cooperating

and there’s time for a swim

before cocktails and steak on the terrace

4.

My drink of the summer owes its origins

to the evening at Café Loup with Terrance Hayes

who drinks only tequila because tequila alone

gives him no hangover and Vinny suggested palomas

grapefruit and tequila and I took that formula

added a splash of Cointreau two splashes

of Giffard grapefruit liqueur three squirts of lime

a lot of ice and shook it in a pickle jar (best

shaker there is) topping it off with club soda

or grapefruit soda in the movie of my life

I play the bartender hero who listens

to everyone’s troubles and woes

People ask me how I’m doing and I say

“I’m livin’ the dream,” a reliable laugh line    

5.

Is Berlioz the Baudelaire of French music

the two geniuses linked by opium

take the “Symphonie Fantastique”

five movements one hour long

so it’s on the car radio when we arrive

and it’s still on when we return

after forty-five minutes of testimony

from the wise man in the wheelchair who

wondered who had it worse

the heroin addicts or the meth heads

the meth kills you faster

you can live longer on heroin

and suffer more

6.

What would I choose as my theme music

if I were the classical music disc jockey

maybe Bernstein’s overture to Candide

or Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Cakewalk”

or Schubert’s overture to “Rosamunde”

in honor of John Scheuer

I have my Tolstoy to look forward to

and if music can stand for peace (the food of love)

today’s poem is a little tribute to the novel

summarized TV-Guide style:

Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.

7.

A beautiful day

Why don’t we get married, I say

We are married, Stacey says

I know but we can pretend

To be you and me

Twenty years ago

Just for the hell of it

Maybe we can even go to Bermuda

And tell people we’re on our honeymoon

And be believed

— June 9-15, 2018

Originally published in Hopkins Review 2019

If dreaming in a foreign language can be a considered a sign of fluency, Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Whereabouts—like the dream—is where she has delved full immersion into the Italian language and embraced it as her own. Lahiri’s novel, originally written as Dove mi trovo in Italian and translated on her own into English, is perhaps a literary rebellion for her American audience—and also for herself. The term for writers who write “outside their voice”, coined as exophonic, alludes to the distinction between the author’s traditional voice and the reinvented one.

And for Lahiri, it is truly a reinvention. If Lahiri is considered an exophonic writer, then she has challenged herself to push through the boundaries of “exo/outsiderness” to a distinct brand of linguistic “insiderness” that adds a fresh notch to her literary milestones, although Whereabouts is not her first venture into writing in Italian. In 2015, Lahiri wrote In alter parole in Italian, with a translation written by Ann Goldstein as In Other Words in 2016. Also in 2016, Lahiri wrote the book, Il vestito deo libri (The Clothing of Books), followed by Dove mi trovo (Whereabouts), published in Milan in 2018. While the first two were autobiographical, Dove mi trovo is the first Italian fictional novel that Lahiri has written and subsequently translated on her own.

The careful brush strokes she has painted into this work are extraordinary; each word, in a language no longer foreign, is chosen with determination. It is ironic that she prefaces the novel with the quote from Italian writer, Italo Svevo: “Every time my surroundings change I feel enormous sadness. It’s not greater when I leave a place tied to memories, grief or happiness. It’s the change itself that unsettles me, just as liquid in a jar turns cloudy when you shake it.” While Lahiri’s protagonist has never left the city in which she lives and struggles to sway from her routine, Lahiri herself has embraced change by moving her family to Italy in her zeal for the Italian language and culture.

Lahiri’s most fervent readers who are searching for her former style and themes of cultural identity, assimilation and dislocation with immigration, will not find it in this novel. What they will encounter is a profoundly transparent reflection of a young woman’s daily solitude. The theme of displacement lingers with the narrator’s continuous discomfort with her surroundings, but Whereabouts’ unnamed protagonist, unlike the central character in Lahiri’s earlier works, has remained in the same environment throughout her life. In an unnamed country—Europe is implied—with an unnamed narrator, Lahiri takes readers through a series of vignettes that explores the day-to-day life of a woman of around 46 years of age ruminating on her own solitude and “the banal, stubborn residue of life.” The contents of the book are organized by location i.e. “On the Sidewalk,” “At the Museum” or temporally “In August” or “At Dawn”. As Lahiri herself wavers between America, India, and Italy, in Whereabouts, readers are immersed in the various spurts of possible plot that never quite proliferate in the protagonist’s life. While characters are introduced, they don’t seem to make any impact on the narrator’s future. “Pleasant encounters like this break up our daily meanderings. We have a chaste, fleeting bond. As a result, it can’t advance, it can’t take the upper hand. He’s a good man, he loves my friend and their children.” We anticipate a follow-up that never veritably materializes. These vignettes are simply the narrator’s daily musings, tinged with melancholy, that do not actually translate to any change in plot development. But the truth and beauty in that portrait of humanity and daily experience is seethingly real and still vividly realized.

Readers rather encounter a slide reel of the protagonist’s memories disparaging her critical mother and reminiscing about her loving but bystander father, who died when she was 15. Like her trips to the pool, “eight different lives share the water at a time, never intersecting,” the characters in the novel never really intersect in a meaningful way. They are only in her life at the margins. Lahiri presents a somewhat dystopic portrait of daily life in the depiction of this protagonist but also in the lives of the people she encounters.

It is not quite clear yet if this is a characteristic of a new voice, point of view, or her Italian writing style. For those readers who are accustomed to Lahiri’s figurative style of writing with its focus on the South Asian immigrant experience, the stark contrast might be alarming. This reading will not render those homologous connections to the immigrant experience, but it is not Lahiri’s responsibility to bind her readers to these connections with her work. Whereabouts rebels against the expectations for Lahiri to adhere to former themes of culture and identity that she has felt constrained by in the past. Lahiri demonstrates her frustration with readers’ questions:

‘But this book in Italian is an exception, isn’t it? It’s not part of a longer path, right? But won’t you be writing about me, my family, my experiences anymore?’ This sense of expectation is a heavy burden and takes away my appetite for writing. I would rather find another job. Because to me, writing means freedom.

Like Moushimi in Lahiri’s 1^st novel, The Namesake— for whom “immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—it was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever,” Lahiri so chooses to immerse herself in all things Italian, and the language with which she feels more authority than in Bengali, but less mastery than in English. Is she finitely an Italian author now? As Edward W. Said, writes in Culture and Imperialism, “No one today is purely one thing.”

The challenge of writing in the language of the unfamiliar is clearly not for the faint-hearted, but increasingly we can see in Whereabouts, Lahiri has mastered it. While the notion of voice can be interpreted in both the linguistic and the verbal, it does not read exactly like Lahiri’s former literary voice. The succinct sentences of her translated prose is a contrast to the intricate writing and the imagery in her earlier English novels. On the other hand, it is a linguistic rebirth; and Lahiri thrives on this awakening. If voice is socially constructed, is this how she was taught to read and write in Italian? Is she succinct because she is writing with a limited vocabulary or because this is her way of seeing the world? Either way, Lahiri should be commended for her valiant experimentation with language. Often, individuals experimenting with new languages perpetuate a shyness—a metaphorical insecure giggle—but this is not reflected in Lahiri’s work. Lahiri writes with the confidence of her character, Mr. Kapasi in Pulitzer Prize winning, Interpreter of Maladies, when he began to aquire expertise in new languages. On the other hand, as Lahiri recounts in interviews, when you are considered an expert, you don’t write in the same way. That confidence and expectation can give way to a literary surrender. And Lahiri discernibly has no desire to wave that white flag. In fact, like her former characters who braved a new world with immigration, Lahiri, too, risks her present sanctuary for the literary unknown.

While Lahiri’s past works of literature that were written in English have been centered in the South Asian diaspora, she has always flirted with Rome in her books, weaving in threads of characters’ connections to Italy. Her works written in Italian have now become a sort of praxis, reflection into action. In Other Words is the reflection, and Whereabouts is the action. And she has truly committed herself to this introspection. Like her characters from The Interpreter of Maladies, she has delved into other worlds beyond her predilection for writing about identity and heritage, which has, in effect, created a departure from Lahiri’s former voice and style and reflects a paradigm shift for her as a writer. Whether she will come back to her former literary techniques is yet to be seen. Still, it is invigorating to experience this new side of her writing and writing reflections. As her characters from her previous books travel back and forth to India, Lahiri travels back and forth to Italy, discovering a home and solace in the Italian language. Like Hema from Unaccustomed Earth, whose love affair with Kaushik—though a rebellion—reminds her of home, Lahiri is likewise freed from “the weight of an imposed identity.” “You need to dig where you don’t feel comfortable” she explains in a 2017 interview with Francesca Pellas. Perhaps this is the most important lesson we are encouraged to follow: dig where it is uncomfortable—don’t mire yourself in comfort, for what might result is an awakening. Lahiri has cultivated a new voice and language, inviting readers with differing narratives of displacement and isolation to connect. In Whereabouts, Lahiri trades security for freedom and it is fascinating to read the journey in her writing.

In Other Words was the first book that Lahiri wrote in Italian but the translation was written by Ann Goldstein. Lahiri’s discourse about the process of translating her own work with a faithful translation has demonstrated that it has been an arduous journey. In concurrence with Jorge Luis Borges’ perception that the “The original is unfaithful to the translation,” Lahiri, too, has reflected on whether a translator, similar to a book cover designer, can get it wrong. As she writes in her 2^nd book in Italian, The Clothing of Books, “Like a translation, a cover can be faithful to the book, or it can be misleading.” In an act of regaining authority and discipline, Lahiri decided to translate Whereabouts on her own.

Lahiri has deliberately chosen a relationship with the Italian language. In a piece that she wrote for The New Yorker in 2015, Lahiri illustrated “My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.” This relationship allows her to reflect, to separate herself from her literary accolades, and start anew, developing a less traditional narrative structure. When an author challenges her literary tradition, the writing does not stay static. Lahiri describes her writing in Italian as a faucet that turns on when she travels to Italy and off when she is back in the U.S. For her readers, it is a different read altogether, and demonstrates, in its simplest form, that it is never too late to try something new. It is not clear if this rebirth of writing in Italian means the death of writing in English. What is clear is that this writing is her portagioie or “joy box”. And it is the reader’s as well.

The striking, Borgesian death of Wren Cartwright is the forgotten story of East Village lore. Precisely because the neighborhood has experienced seismic tumult, from the crack epidemic to the AIDS crisis to rapid gentrification, it has left few witnesses to such an eccentric lifestyle and its improbable end. Thus separating reality from anecdote is that much more difficult.  

While alive, Wren Cartwright was but one among a veritable platoon of tatterdemalion book scouts who threaded the New York City subway systems, slouching subterranean travelers who emerged into the light of day only to plunge into musty, outer-borough second-hand stores, or to canvas estate sales upstate for first editions or bundles of Civil War letters that had, until then, been rotting in attics. Chelsea flea-markets were frequent battle grounds as this horde of hustlers possessed sharp elbows and shrewd, encyclopedic knowledge of literary arcana. They were known to screech at one another if they happened to reach for a fine, embossed copy of Treasure Island at the same time. Auction houses, book collectors, and the less-esteemed bookstores of the Upper East Side all purchased their wares (some shopkeepers met these grubby shades at the back door where they were paid for their pickings off the books and in cash). They were always men, mostly middle-aged or wizened, be-speckled bachelors on the march, daily circling New York City, moving just enough books to survive at a subsistent level. Most wore a laminated copy of their independent retailer’s license on a thread around their neck to silently signal to timid clerks that they didn’t have to pay sales tax. All were on the hunt for that elusive white whale in book form to lift them from poverty. That paper Moby Dick would surface on the horizon during blazing sunsets of rent-fueled desperation at the end of every month—a first edition Fitzgerald that, at a glance looked to be signed by the infamous alcoholic, only it was the scribbled name of the book’s previous owner.  With an exhausted sigh the volume was slung onto the counter for purchase as the fog of false hope swirled anew. 

Except for Wren Cartwright. He miraculously scored. 

As the story goes, told and retold among scouts, collectors, and retailers, one humid July afternoon he found himself at a Brooklyn Heights church rummage sale. There, within a box of old newspapers and coverless paperbacks secreted within a battered, stained and nearly unsalable copy of Leaves of Grass was a cache of yellowed letters from a young Bram Stoker to the master himself. They nearly slid out and onto the dirty gray sidewalk. Words unread for a century.  Even better, drafts of Whitman’s appreciative replies were tucked in as well. Scribbles of his poetry reached for the margins. Wren clutched the parcel to his heaving chest with one hand while thrusting exact change at the salesperson, lest they, in breaking a dollar bill, had time to inspect the item, declare it a treasure and set it aside as no longer for sale. He stuffed the receipt into his greasy billfold and fled down into the subway. These feral booksellers were a shrewd bunch, and Wren knew that the letters were going to lift him out of poverty like bat wings. For at that moment, the revival of Dracula ruled Broadway. The black etchings of Edward Gorey’s poster for the play were plastered all over town. As his discovery was just a few years after the Stonewall riot, gay culture was on the rise and as such letters of this nature were quite collectable. Wren’s whale had surfaced in a perfect confluence of trend, popular culture, and exclusivity. The faded book plate declared the owner of this volume to have been the sexton of the very church where Cartwright had made the purchase. Whitman had famously lived in the area, so provenance was not a problem. He knew not to take the letters to the bookstores; they would preemptively dismiss his find, outright devalue it, begrudgingly offer a pittance and sell the letters in the window at a criminally high mark-up. No, treasure such as this was destined for an international seller, likely for auction to the highest bidder. Bypassing Manhattan’s big-name auction houses and their byzantine approval processes, he shakily made the rare long-distance call to a London firm that dealt only in books and manuscripts and they immediately set an appointment for their New York representative to inspect the letters. In short order, the sale was made to an anonymous collector with a standing order to pay top dollar for items relating to a short list of favored authors. The buyer went public after the sale with the intent of gifting some of the letters to Trinity College Dublin. Biographers for both writers cawed to the press that this was the literary discovery of the decade. Within a fortnight of his find, a large amount of money was wallowing in Wren Cartwright’s bank account. And with this, some of his habits began to change: not his dress, he still took the subway, he still ate miserly in out-of-the-way diners; though he continued to move books around town, for the first time in his mostly unrecorded life, Wren began to acquire for taste, not profit.  

While little is known of Cartwright before his windfall, more is known about the years leading up to his dramatic demise. Public records offer up a birth in Delaware, an unfinished degree in English from Stetson University in Florida (it’s speculated that he left as a result of a campus-wide purge of homosexual students and staff. There’s no evidence for this except the explicit timing of his hasty move north). Tax returns show a variety of low-paying clerking jobs until his obsessive love of literature eventually translated into a peripatetic existence of selling books while living in a variety of SROs up and down the outskirts of Manhattan. It’s worth noting that the majority of his early residences were always within walking distance of major gay cruising spots on the city’s Westside, though any connection is purely conjecture. As far as we know, Cartwright left no journals, and lived a friendless life outside of his connections to the book trade. He disowned or was disowned by his family (they refused to collect his corpse, which was cremated and buried on Hart Island, a potter’s field off the Bronx so overfed with the bodies of New York’s forgotten that skulls roll ashore on Orchard Beach after strong storms). His drift into a hermitic existence is hard to trace, though money from the Stoker-Whitman sale fueled an unstated resolve. He immediately moved to a large, ground floor studio in the East Village at a time when it was a cheap and dangerous neighborhood. The Bowery was blighted, muggings common. Since he could have afforded safer, more luxurious housing, in hindsight it is tempting to surmise that he chose this apartment neither for thrift nor location, but the singular rarity that his front door both opened to the street and was equipped with a mail slot.   

There are many different types of bibliomania. Beyond the typical affinity for genre, there are literary manias that, oddly, have gone unrecorded. At the time, Wren Cartwright’s death received little notice outside a curt, riddle-like headline in the August 5th, 1998 edition of The New York Post: Porn Addict Chokes To Death on Smut. His peculiar story has gained more attention in recent years as hoarding, the compulsive collecting of things, has moved from an obscure concern among social workers and into the public sphere via reality shows and social media. While the tapestry of New York City is stained with countless lonely deaths, none have ever been as articulate or as unusual as Wren Cartwright’s suicide. 

With the Stoker-Whitman sale, his focus shifted entirely onto gay erotica and pornography. The mass of gay pulp produced during prior decades was, at that time, unwanted and unappreciated. These steamy sex romps from the fifties and sixties were discarded as more emboldened, celebratory gay pornography followed the sexual revolution. Cartwright not only purchased every available copy of gay pulp that he could get his hands on—he also acquired large quantities of Bob Mizer’s pictorial magazines and any and all lewd apocrypha. Bookseller and original member of New York City’s Gay Men’s Chorus Ben McFall reports that his reputation among the other booksellers was someone who paid well and in cash for any and all gay material. “I also saw him at the bars, drinking alone, always reading, never socializing. I never saw him at the baths. Most of the book scouts were straight, so I expected he’d have been pleased to see a familiar face but he never made small talk.” Similarly, Glenway Wescott biographer Jerry Rosco, a longtime resident of the East Village, knew Cartwright by sight. “He was just one of those characters you saw around town, always lugging a bag of books with him. I heard he got banned from The Oscar Wilde Bookshop for haranguing a customer who bought the last copy of some porno mag he lusted after.” Cartwright also subscribed to every gay publication of a sexual nature. Among his known magazine and chapbook subscriptions, from the popular to the obscure (this is far from an exhaustive list), were Black Inches, Blueboy, Bound and Gagged, Drum, Drummer, Freshmen, Guzzler Magazine, Honcho, International Barracks, Latin Inches, Mandate, Mister, Playguy, Samson, Stepson Quarterly, Straight To Hell, Urge and Vulcan. 

He is known to have quarreled with Straight to Hell editor and fellow curmudgeon, Boyd McDonald. Cartwright accused McDonald of withholding several early issues of STH simply to spite him. While McDonald was known to play or trick or two, he was also famously cash-strapped and would have benefited from Cartwright’s largess, so it’s likely a minor dust-up in some Times Square porn store has transmogrified into legend. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: Cartwright, as the consummate consumer, frequented the same haunts as editor Boyd McDonald and science fiction and fantasy author Samuel R. Delaney, writers who explicitly recorded the erotic adventures Wren coveted, and was in turn consumed by; a sexual Ouroboros of gluttony. One can’t help but think that, though Delaney and McDonald were the risk-takers, desire triumphs obsession as at least desire can be spent. With obsession, accumulation occurs until somewhere a dam breaks, either psychically or otherwise.  

From the limited information we can gain from the police report, there was no furniture in Wren’s apartment with the exception of a spent mattress on the floor. Every inch was given over to his burgeoning library. Even the refrigerator had been removed some years prior; his corpse was described as emaciated, so at some point his collecting trapped him/entombed him. His rent was paid far enough in advance to guarantee mummification before his body was discovered. So much is unknown, including whether the mailman who made the fateful delivery was aware that he or she had inadvertently caused the death of another human being. Nor was it possible to know which magazine delivered the fateful blow, enforcing a seppuku of centerfolds and tan lines down Cartwright’s open mouth, choking him to death. No photographs of the scene, quickly ruled a suicide, survive. (No photographs taken of the reclusive Cartwright while he was alive have to come to light, either). What was apparent, however, is that the abundance of books and magazines, and likely rare manuscripts and letters, were arranged in such a way as to act as gears: each conveyance of pornographic material in anonymous brown paper wrappers during those final days set a domino-process in motion. At some point, Cartwright could no longer rise from his bed. Enthroned on piles of pulp as mail was pushed through the slot, prior deliveries were propelled forward. Think of the dark architectural designs from the great eighteenth century illustrator Piranesi come to life. The meticulousness of this paper clockwork meant that, near starvation, Wren Cartwright was able to purse his lips and receive one final delivery, extreme unction, possibly in the form of a California surfer, nude, looking over his sun-kissed shoulder, a wave about to break that never will. 

The complexity of this machination cannot be overstated. The singularity of the design is overwhelming: the entire apartment and all of its contents were arranged to act as a slow-moving guillotine, his obscene library serving double duty as a deadly apparatus, a contraption the creation of which required an outré imagination and nearly fiendish planning. It’s likely models were built and tested, attempts failed, plans revisited; the investment of time, the sheer determination, is unfathomable and augments Cartwright’s suicide to a new form of self-expression, surpassing the mere politics of immolated monks and all their ilk. 

It is now considered culturally criminal that such a vast collection of pornography, one that likely represented the entire erotic output of gay America up until his death, was unceremoniously hauled to the dump. This loss was described by poet and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Merrick Community College Philip F. Clark as “The burning of our Library of Alexander. Or more likely our Library of Bagoas, Alexander’s boy-eunuch lover, for those magazines were in their own way love letters. The men pictured had the bodies we all coveted; the stories were ones we could only tell each other.” Likely somewhere within the now defunct Fresh Kills landfill, this buried museum quietly rots. Glossy buttocks, mimeographed cocks, page after page of torrid encounters and anatomical descriptions are blindly churned to soil by innumerable insects. Was Wren Cartwright’s collection a suicide note or a paean to beauty, an example of mental illness unchecked or a singular act of deviance: one of carnal images and lurid letters, a cut-up like no other, designed to make the ghost of William S. Burroughs stew in jealously within his bunker, just a few blocks away?  On the tenth anniversary of his death, painter and performance artist Lorenzo De Los Angeles launched a one-night art installation at the East Village experimental theater, La MaMa, symbolically recreating Wren Cartwright’s moment of death. Inspired by the erotic artistry of Surrealist Hans Bellmer, works of gay pornography were connected by an intricate web of strings to a plastic skeleton being force-fed images via an elaborate series of funnels in a room created by cardboard boxes. Every time a viewer plucked at one of the strings, another image would slide into the skeleton’s unhinged jaws, filling the fishbowl ensconced within its ribcage, making the viewer complicit in Cartwright’s demise. Outside of De Los Angeles’s moving sculpture and a passing mention in Gary Indiana’s autobiography that he suspected Cartwright of swiping the original manuscript of his first novel, Horse Crazy, New York City’s culture commentary on Cartwright’s bizarre demise has been surprisingly minimal. Only singer Dean Johnson of the Velvet Mafia is known to have consistently memorialized the compulsive collector.  After Wren’s passing, he frequently dedicated shows to him. (Johnson’s own 2007 death is shrouded in mystery.)  

The methodical premeditation of such a suicide surpasses the typical diagnosis of hoarding, which is based on the fear of letting go. With Cartwright’s death, we have the creation of an Egyptian tomb, replete with homoerotic hieroglyphs. The mailman was merely a servant laying the last brick, sealing the sepulcher, as it were. Or is his death a mystery we will never solve? Should we avoid reflexively painting it as a tragedy? For if his actions were a thanatological embrace of the erotic life society had tried so hard to evict him from, then Wren Cartwright can be said to have built not a tomb, but a cathedral of desire, one whose collapse he himself orchestrated, as all religions eventually implode as sacrament begets sacrifice.

Sam Goody was a haven set across from a broken decorative fountain in the dimly lit mall I grew up near, a shop where misfits and bankers, smokers and jocks, single mothers and next-door neighbors found themselves assembled by a shared desire for music. It was a place for discovery, a place where unearthing a musical gem, by force or by accident, could help a youth from a small Southern town carve out an identity. An open mind and some disposable income could lead to a treasure that might alter your life.

If, like me, you didn’t have any disposable income, then a Christmas gift certificate from your cooler, older cousin would suffice. On this occasion, the winter of 1994, the deck, was stacked against me. When you’re on the cusp of the awful in-between years of adolescence the world is a confusing place. None of your choices matter but, to you, every choice carries the weight of the future. It never once occurred to me that choices were reversible or even inconsequential in the grand plan. Choosing between albums to purchase? You may as well ask me to select an organ to remove.     

I knew what I was supposed to listen to, what I was supposed to choose. Radio and social pressures pushed me toward acceptable, popular music of the day: alternative rock bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam; pop stars such as Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, and Boyz II Men; contemporary country by the likes of Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus. I loved it all and I wanted to opt for the biggest status-achieving album I could afford. I knew that my choices on that day in that Sam Goody would forever elevate my social status and transform me into a wise, sophisticated trendsetter within my church youth group and my inner circle of friends—both of them. God willing, it might even grant me a silent nod of approval from the store employee with the spiked hair and nose ring.

None of that happened. Instead, I chose poorly.

As desperate as I was to have my musical choices accepted, there was a small pang in my head imploring me to do something drastic: to expand my musical horizons. With a world of music at my fingertips, my burgeoning adult consciousness vetoed every decision my adolescent heart came up with. That’s how I ended up with two, bargain-priced CDs: Lead Belly’s Greatest Hits and Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming. I may as well have opted to open a 401k with my change jar. 

At home, both records sounded awful to my nascent, underdeveloped ears. ‘Awful,’ however, at age 13 really meant, “These songs don’t sound like the other songs I like on the radio.” Even in “CD quality sound!” they sounded hollow and muddled, like a warped picture broadcast to an ancient television. Worse, they sounded like the past, and it was a past I wanted nothing to do with. Yet, here I was, the new owner of two relics from music history.

The Lead Belly CD made for rough listening as it sounded like a copy of a copy of a copy from some ancient field recordings. Out of tune and barely audible even at high volume, I didn’t even make it through once. Like any other proud member of the Alternative Nation, I listened to “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” twice and then watched my (bootlegged) VHS copy of Nirvana: MTV Unplugged in New York, knowing that Nirvana’s unchained closer, a cover of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, was superior in every way to the original recording. Nirvana’s version was loud, unhinged, and very, very cool. Lead Belly was exactly none of those things.

Dylan’s Slow Train Coming was equally unlistenable, albeit in a different way. Around 1978, Dylan converted to evangelical Christianity, recorded several Christian-themed albums, refused to play his prior secular material in concert, and routinely prophesied to audiences onstage. He was a man transformed and Slow Train Coming was the first recorded output from this “born again” period. It’s an album rife with Christian allegory, sermonizing, and pointed religious imagery. The album’s cover art is an extension of this theme, a literal image of a train moving (slowly, I presume) across tracks being built, one by one. In the foreground, a man holds a pickaxe that resembles a none-too-subtle cross, ready to wield it with power. Dylan fans are not always keen on this period of his career, to put it mildly. I will, however, go one step further: Slow Train Coming was fucking awful to listen to. It was painful, burdensome, boring, and very much the opposite of a religious experience. I just wanted it to end.

I made it through all of Slow Train Coming in one sitting, but it was 46 minutes of my young life I’ll never get back. When I was done listening, I turned right back to my (bootlegged) Nirvana video, and, as the opening chords of “About A Girl” rolled out from the television speakers, I remember thinking, Thank God—thank GOD—I have some real music to listen to. I needed to wash the sour sounds of Dylan’s holy visions out of my ears.

Dylan’s transformation from revolutionary poet and songwriter to Christian evangelist happened unbeknownst to my young self. All I heard in the music (all two times I listened to it) was gospel backup singers, big brass horns, noodling, non-grunge guitar, and a man whose voice can best be described as unique. The lyrics read like they were ripped straight from Wednesday night choir practice (e.g., “For all those who have eyes and all those who have ears/

It is only He who can reduce me to tears”). Worse, I was being preached to on (what I thought) was a rock and roll record. At a time in my life when I was actively attempting to rebel against those same ideas Dylan embraced, I had just blown what little musical capital I had on albums that were brutally out-of-step with who I wanted to be. The adult choices I made that day in Sam Goody delivered unto me some adult consequences. This was music that my parents might enjoy, and I had to eliminate that evidence with a quickness.

I trashed both CDs. I dropped them in the garbage bin and hauled it to the curb. It didn’t occur to me to try to return them, and the nearest place I could have tried to sell them off was at least 100 miles away. I don’t even think I knew selling used CDs was a thing until I was 16 or 17. Besides, drastic times call for drastic measures. Or so I reckoned. 

I know what I’m supposed to say: “I was young then, I’m older now and learned a valuable lesson about life. I realized that there’s more to music than the first listen and I wish I still had those CDs.” But, no. I’m not sorry I got rid of them. They were useless to me at the time, a form of musical currency I couldn’t cash in and they would be equally useless to me now, I suspect. In the time I’ve devoted to discussing, writing about, and dissecting music, I never once thought, “Man, I still wish I had those CDs.” Not once. I’ve gone back to listen to Slow Train Coming and most of Lead Belly’s recordings. They are perfectly fine documents that I understand are culturally important. I acknowledge their value, but they did not have the intended consequences of a Dylan-esque conversion. Not the way I hoped they might, anyway.

I’ve encountered music since then that has transformed my mental faculties, my listening habits, and my understanding of music’s role in our culture. I’ve had moments when my young life was altered by music’s more holy qualities, times when it felt like music could unlock knowledge of my identity. I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t been transformed by at least one song or one musical moment in their lives. Being transformed by music, however, is a lengthy process. It is full of false starts and terrible choices along the road to enlightenment. No listening experience remains the same from month to month, let alone year to year.

What strikes me about that moment, what keeps that memory encased in my hippocampus, is how much I tried to force a transformation to happen that day. I believed that if I sacrificed momentary indulgence for lengthier gratification, if I played the long game and opted for a slow train rather than the fastest method of arrival, I would be better off; I could even win at life. Not only would I achieve lasting happiness by shunning those immediate urges to pick up a copy of Throwing Copper on CD, eschewing trends and current cultural commodity and elevating the status of my capital-S Self, but I would also be recognized and rewarded for my intelligence. Instead, it all ended up the trash and I was out $30 in Sam Goody gift certificate cash.

Forcing a musical transformation left me broke and broken, unhappy and unfulfilled. I didn’t learn any lessons after being burned by my choices. At the time, I was just mad and disappointed with the unfairness of it all. Still, remnants of that 14-year-old holding a Soul Asylum album in one hand and a Velvet Underground album in the other, knowing which one I want and opting for the other, still exist every time I make a musical selection. I’ll never outrun these choices—the ‘should’ and ‘should nots’—so I’ve learned to work around them and to choose whatever works for me in the moment.

By the time I was old enough to revisit Dylan’s catalog, the entire mall and the Sam Goody from my youth was wholly abandoned. As shoppers migrated to Best Buy and Target, the interiors stayed empty and unrented until one day, without celebration, the entire mall, and the world of music it once contained, was leveled into a flat piece of earth.

Almost ten years after that regrettable Sam Goody experience, on a visit home, a passing train forced me to stop my car outside of town, a few miles from the spot where the mall once stood. I watched as train cars creaked along slowly, covered with graffiti and littered with odd, disjointed images, artist tags and colorful tableaus. I looked up from my CD wallet in time for one oddly familiar image to roll by. On a train car in black spray paint, a man with a floppy hat and cross-shaped pickaxe, similar to the man centered on the album cover of Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, was poised mid-swing. “This slow train is bound for glory!” was spray-painted above his head. Maybe so, maybe it was headed to that destination. But I wasn’t on that train. Instead, I rolled over the tracks after the last train car disappeared from sight. I had some other destination in mind. Somewhere very similar but also very different.

Kroll’s hands lay slack on the table as if he meant to abandon them there. I wondered what an investigating judge was obligated to do about a man like Kroll, and whether, in calling me to this cafe, the judge now shirked her duty or bent to it. 

The cafe was still shuttered against scorching daylight, now dimming. Soon the night markets would open: divining beetles, sea-petroleum, delicate bottles of attar of orange. A skink without a tail darted up the wall. 

“You’re very quiet,” the judge said. “Have I mistaken myself in you?”

The judge needn’t have worried; my autobiography of Kroll would not lack color or incident. Kroll had traveled, and that could go into the book, as could the melancholy of the packet-boat, and waking cold and disconsolate in grimy pensions. A stranger here, Kroll had been overcome by “a disease of the will,” as Kroll had called it. I wondered whether there still issued from Kroll some few of those small, threadlike goings-out which could be called hopes but are actually something subtler and more various, largely hidden, hardly coming up to the bearer’s awareness; we are all of us burred with them; they lend to our souls a kind of slubby nap against which others stick or glide with pleasure or aggravation, other people, also projects, objects, events of a certain order. This napped or ridged surface of ourselves is delicate as the flanged underside of a toadstool. It is subject to collapse, in certain lives. It is crushed.

 “You appear to have depths,” the judge said. “But don’t wear them out. No one likes talking to someone who doesn’t like talking.” 

“I am new to this city,” I said. 

“That can’t be helped, can it?” said the judge. “Immerse yourself; recollect; report.”

From outside came the shouts of water-sellers and lottery-foreseers working the knots and queues of stalled autobus traffic. 

“We know where you’re staying,” said the judge. “You’ll be contacted about payment.”

Kroll rose from the table. 

“Am I expected to begin now?” I asked. “How?” 

We kept pace, Kroll at first wavering as if to consult my pleasure in choice of paths. Then he struck a tangent off the ring road, uphill from the harbor and the nighttime souk, along a narrow street lined with corrugated-metal shacks and dead-fronded jacarandas. The book could begin here, with Kroll marching uphill as toward a destiny, perhaps to perish in some strange and somber way. Or let it begin later, on the downslope, as I followed Kroll along a dirt path that ended on a litter-strewn canal-bank. 

The open secret of the so-called sparrows’ meeting place was in all the guidebooks. Some of these particular sparrows looked runty or otherwise plain, as if in flagrant spite of their legend. I hoped this meant the bar was low enough for Kroll to join in—I so wanted to see him hailed or even merely slapped—but he lingered on the edges of the group. The sparrows had come here to play a complicated game. There were no monomaniacs among them; instead, the sparrows had inherited a picture-language, a dramatics, which they wielded with scorn. What mattered was not to declare oneself, nor to lose oneself, but to be seen to operate the picture-language with disdainful ease, the better to gesture to still other schemas, other contents: rich, inexpressible, well known. By twos and threes sparrows would depart for the dark. Gravel skittered down the scree. 

Kroll lingered, forcing me to linger, too, in appearance even more furtive than Kroll. I looked down at a puddle; I thought about fetid water’s integrity as a body, its durable skin. I could not stand to look up from the puddle and see Kroll: his dumbshow of awkwardness, his further dumbshow indicating that this awkwardness was only a costume, that underneath lay passions like anyone’s, like everyone’s. Most painful to me was Kroll’s apparent pride in having concealed from the sparrows what was in truth not at all concealed: that his awkwardness was hateful to him, that he himself was hateful to himself, and that he hoped—in this he was still young—to be proven wrong. It was not sophistication that separated Kroll from the sparrows, or not only. 

Kroll edged closer to a group standing around a trash-barrel fire. Like Kroll, I braced myself for his rejection. How could the sparrows not notice his incompetence, his shocking lack of address? I watched instead their indifferent tender welcome, Kroll’s dazed and beaming gratitude. I told myself that what the sparrows seemed now to give would soon be withdrawn, proffered just this once and then no more, that Kroll did not see this but I did: one day soon he would find it difficult to recall this happiness, though he would never forget it so thoroughly as would the sparrows. To recall happiness is to realize that you are without it, bereft. 

Kroll opened his wallet. He held out a folded bill or maybe a visiting card. I came closer.

“I am not a mystic,” Kroll said.

No one replied. 

“I am not an adventurer,” Kroll added. He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands wide in demonstration of his innocence. One sparrow snatched at his hand and another took Kroll by the arm. In the dark, Kroll and the sparrows took up the customary poses. Was the picture-language really as limited as this? I stretched myself out on the ground next to Kroll; at once the posture yielded me its idiot thrill but it seemed to say nothing to anyone else. No one engaged me; no one stepped on my head. And yet a convention of the autobiographical genre requires me to furnish this account with sensations. Gravel pricked my palms; I shivered; the earth smelled vegetal, marine. Nearby, a soft sound, as of a nightjar’s rustling wingbeats. Listening to Kroll shriek and mewl, it seemed to me I could stay like this always, in Kroll’s noisy proximity, envious and grateful, when one of the sparrows leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Enough for you.” I stood up and tried to brush the filth from my clothes. Kroll was gone. I thought of asking the others if they’d seen which way he’d been headed. Ship’s horns sounded in the distant harbor. Someone lit a pipe of dense and crumbly kif and we passed it hand to hand, cupping the ember. 

The next morning, as I came out of my hotel, I noticed several men loitering across the square. All were men of one type, Type Kroll: indrawn, bowed, dressed in serge despite the heat. I was sure I recognized Kroll among them. With a single glance back at me, the man who must have been Kroll set off down the twisting street, toward the casbah or the funicular or some other vista as yet unknown to me. 

I watched him go. 

I bought myself a tiffin of boiled cashews and returned to my room. Let Kroll look to himself today. Much of the autobiography would consist of scenes à faire: Kroll pays the asking price for pirated video cassettes in the bazaar; Kroll, at the butcher’s stall, stands mesmerized before a flayed sheep’s head black with crawling flies; Kroll goes to the pier to watch the divers plunge down and bring up lumps of sea-petroleum (the water sluicing off their seal-slick bodies, the shock of their ulcerated hands); Kroll lingers in an ancient and desacralized temple, gazing up at the bone-white vault of the ceiling. These pleasures of travel initially disappoint, but, considered autobiographically, each reveals an edifying mortificant: the bitter lure of novelty, the picturesque immiseration of the global south, the hollowness of the self. This much was as good as written already. 

I worked until the shadows had long since lengthened and the lottery-foreseers were again calling out in the street below. Of the projected scenes and their accompanying skein of aperçus, something less than I’d hoped had written itself: Butchered head. Vault. Slick body, black with flies. I was not disappointed. I read the words as Kroll would have; I felt Kroll’s delight on recognizing his own story.

My room had no proper desk; to write, I had slouched in the only chair, a wicker throne woven in the local style. Now my back ached as if I’d been beaten. Everything in the room, even the latticed wicker, radiated heat. I stood at the window, hoping for the cool of evening to come lapping in. Above flat rooftops of staggered heights, the last remnant of the gloaming had taken on a humid, chemical radiance, a darkness tinged with green and violet, as if malevolent spirits had botched the granting of a childhood wish: to breathe the air of distant planets. I touched my forehead to the windowpane. It was warm as blood. Out there, a figure hung from the glass: conjoint, pendant, peering in at me. I raised my hand and I felt a shudder, a lag, in our doubled motion. 

There was a knock at the door. Before I could answer, a woman swept into my room, dispelling phantoms. She had with her a pair of snorting, gasping dogs; their eyes bulged and their tongues lapped the humid air. 

“I am Ndidi Morchiladze, daughter-adjutant to the judge,” the woman said. 

“Daughter-adjutant?” I asked. 

“Don’t let’s stand on ceremony,” she said. “Show me what you have so far.”

“I haven’t written anything yet,” I said. 

“Have you not?” said Morchiladze. The dogs flopped down at her feet and lay panting. 

“The judge mentioned payment,” I said. When a lie is not ready to hand, I temporize. The Kroll-book would have to arm itself. The weak exotica I had concocted—sorrows, vistas, subtle perceptions—all this could lend Kroll only so much cover. Then too, it was not lost on me that the judge knew only one verdict. How else would a judge judge? It might be best to set Kroll loose in the book as nothing more than a plurality of positions, a series of discontinuous Kroll-functions. 

“Don’t overestimate your faculties; you are not tasked with prophesy,” said Morchiladze. “Your memoir has only to fill in some forensic gaps; let us see events from the perspective of this ‘Kroll.’” 

But why always Kroll, I wondered. I might just as well write about somebody named Schropf, or Dozhd. Or Majeroni. 

“Your book will be a dagger in the head of anyone who thinks they can wait the judge out.”

Morchiladze yanked her dogs to their feet. To the accompaniment of a strangled wheezing, she stalked from the room. 

I believe that Schropf must have foretold his own death, often, and not only boastfully and foolhardily. Dozhd and Majeroni would have recounted the expropriations and the liberations, the sheltering for weeks on end in borrowed apartments in the ugly new-rise blocks. The flight under assumed names, the beginning of the long wait here in this tropic land. And then Schropf would say that he’d seen another of their countrymen today, another today, as if following them. Schropf had foretold, too, the un-worlding pain of it, and the quailing irrectitude of his murderers, the police. He’d known that he would have to prop them up at the last, hew them to their duty as executioners while they larked and giggled and pitied themselves. 

Schropf had been mistaken in much: there had been no extradition, and consequently no long walk through fog-shrouded streets of home; no eerie quiet in which to gather the necessary equanimity; no faint scent of the city market (salt-cod and cut flowers); no face glimpsed at a slate-roofed gable window, eyes downcast in scorn or love. 

The death of Dozhd had gone without saying: as Schropf, so Dozhd, all their life.

Just before he bolted I made Majeroni promise never to tell anyone how I let him escape: loping, zip-tied and bloodied, over the garbage-strewn plain, unaware how his white shirt shone in the van’s headlights; dragged back, stumbling and sobbing, laid down among them, face-down, like them. How the vault of the sky must have wheeled above them all the long night through; like sleepers, they could not know it; like dreamers, they only thought they woke. 

Kroll and I walked along the canal. Snake-birds perched on fence-palings, drying their outspread wings. Kroll had broken cover just after dawn, sauntering out the doorway of a shebeen. I could have caught up to Kroll right then, or at any point since. I hung back. The gravel towpath became a broad cobblestone causeway; we were nearing the city proper. 

The morning was already hot. I had gone without sleep, keeping watch for Kroll’s emergence from the shebeen. Outside, I had had to imagine the scene within: the conviviality of submerged hostility, the slow and fumy self-poisoning from wood alcohol, the dancers and the sharpers and the barman all wrecked on kif and shine. 

By dawn I felt leached of life, parched and hollow. 

“Kroll,” I called out. He might be prevailed on to slow down. 

The morning air was close. Sweat dripped down the small of my back. I felt, rather than saw, a slackening of my perceptual field, followed by a suffusion of dreamily parti-colored spots. I lurched; a wall of ground rushed up at me. 

“Kroll,” I said again, but it came out softly, murmured into the ground. The mud beneath the paving-stones smelled vegetal, marine. By the time I had struggled to my feet once more, Kroll had put quite a distance between us. To gain on him, it seemed to me I had to command my legs with an undue deliberateness, inwardly telling each in its turn, “Go, go.” This effort of mine was registered by that steadfast inhabitant of the pilot-house we all carry high in the crown of our head; he took up residence there the moment we learned to speak; he is no pilot at all, he has merely been on watch all this while, aware of all that comes and goes within the dome spread out beneath him. Thoughts and feelings have been the least of it; he is keen; he registers all subtle, all barely detectable motion: faint tremors, ghosts of abandoned longings, pale shadows that flit by. Now, after long years, he knows us so well he can predict what we will do next, and what in turn will happen then, but he never intervenes; he will not so much as issue a timely warning; he is like a doorman who neglects to tell you that you have had a caller. If only we could prise him from his stronghold.

I shouted Kroll’s name. He seemed to hear me, even at such a distance; he halted without turning around. 

I called out again: “Kroll! I know you, what you are. Confess your aberrant tendencies: mysticism and adventuring.”

I did not know Kroll, what he was. But what other gambit did I have, what appeals did I know how to make, other than imprecations? Perhaps I was the judge’s creature after all. 

Kroll walked on. The canal passed under a bridge and Kroll vanished in darkness. Traffic streamed over the bridge under a brightening mackerel sky. I could see nothing in the darkness beneath the iron vault of the bridge, and nothing beyond that. Kroll might have already walked on. Soon Kroll would make himself part of that rushing world, lost to me for good. Soon, or already, lost to me for good. I hurried. 

“Kroll,” I said as I came into the shadows. I stood still. It was cold in the sudden dark; the air smelled of canal-borne pollutants and whatever ichorous algae survived them. I was afraid I might not be able to resist the temptation to hurl myself into the black water that sluiced and rushed in the dark. I made ready to enjoin Kroll once more to confess to mysticism and adventuring. 

“Kroll,” I said again.  

“Kroll,” said Kroll’s voice in the dark. 

I took faltering steps toward the voice. Space pressed in on me. 

Now I saw how to write Kroll’s book. It would not in the least resemble the one the judge had commissioned of me. To attain the greatest dispersion of Kroll-functions, to array them in unforeseeable constellations, I would have to seize the inhabitant of pilot-house in his stronghold. What he knows, what we will know as soon as we take hold of him, is the discontinuous: the ghosts of urges and recoilings (pale shadows); and how people pressed themselves on your mind and even your heart, before they revealed themselves for what they had been all along, phantoms, nothing but phantoms; and the way we used to sense, while in the grip of fever, that there was another schema behind the schema to which we thought our thoughts appealed. And more than that, the Kroll-book would be written in the language of the pilot-house, which shares not one word with our own.

Kroll did not see the ground rush up at him this time. Gravel pricked his palms; he shivered.